220 GHz High Efficiency Tripler Based on AlN Substrate

In this paper, the design of a 220 GHz frequency tripler based on Schottky diode is proposed for future imaging and communication system. In order to increase the power handling of the tripler, aluminum nitride (AlN) is selected as the material of the circuit substrate, which has better thermal conductivity compared with currently widely used fused quartz. The 3D model of the Schottky diode is built in EM simulation software to consider the parasitic element of the diode chip. The tripler circuit is optimized by the combination of EM simulation in HFSS and nonlinear simulation in ADS. The simulation results show that the efficiency of the 220 GHz tripler is above 5% within the frequency band from 208 to 228 GHz with input power of 300mW. Best performance is achieved at 219 GHz with conversion efficiency of 17%, resulting in 51 mW output power.